Pop Culture Wars: Religion and the Role of Entertainment in American Life By William D. Romanowski Intervarsity 379 pp.; $19.99, paper
What on Earth Are We Doing? Finding Our Place As Christians in the World By John Fischer Servant/Vine 220 pp.; $12.99, paper
When I applied for admission to a Christian college in 1971, I was required to sign a pledge that I would not, among other things, attend the legitimate theater or motion picture houses, or participate in social dancing of any sort from time of acceptance until graduation. Having grown up in a home where these amusements were commonplace, I signed the pledge reluctantly, thinking the education and experience at this particular school would be worth the sacrifice.
Little did I realize that such a pledge was not simply a neutral instrument of collegiate discipline and conformity such as one might find at a military academy. No, the code of conduct was a potent symbol of what Kim Riddlebarger, in a spin from a Frank Peretti novel, calls “this present paranoia”: a fearfulness that has haunted American evangelicalism since the turn of the century. And though the Christian college I attended is one of many to have since dropped their stringent codes of behavior, that anxiety has hardly abated.
While evangelicals continue to presume that the modern world is by nature hostile to the Christian faith, a Michigan college professor and a California folk singer raise the possibility that, far from being oppressed by a secular society, evangelicals themselves may actually project the very hostility to the world they claim is directed at them. In Pop Culture Wars, William Romanowski of Calvin College places today’s entertainment wars in historical context, thoroughly documenting the rather bumpy ride that has characterized the relationship between the popular arts and religion in the United States. In What on Earth Are We Doing? recording artist and popular campus speaker John Fischer reveals his misgivings about the consumer-driven, “decaffeinated” culture held together by evangelical broadcasting, music, and publishing industries, a parallel culture from which Fischer himself has profited. The two authors arrive at the same conclusion: responsible Christian discipleship demands less reaction to and rhetoric against modern culture, and more understanding and appreciation of it. In this respect, Romanowski and Fischer rewrite George Duffield’s classic Civil War hymn by telling evangelicals it is time to sit down and listen for Jesus for a change.
There is nothing new about the battle being waged today between Hollywood and cultural and religious conservatives, Romanowski reminds us. The same religious, political, legal, and commercial pressures that vie to shape modern entertainment, he says, were very much at work behind Shakespeare’s Globe Theater in Elizabethan England. Romanowski confines most of his discussion, however, to the United States in the twentieth century and to what he believes is the most democratic and thoroughly American of art forms, the motion picture.
The debut of picture shows in urban America–during a period of enormous cultural change–exposed the deeper anxieties of the age. Romanowski cites as an illustration the 1907 crisis in New York when several nickelodeon managers were arrested for violating Sabbath-observance laws and showing indecent pictures. The subsequent confrontation between clergy and entertainment representatives drew one of the largest public hearings ever held in city hall.
While the media scholar does not explicitly say so, his story makes it clear that American Protestants–whether of fundamentalist or modernist ilk–did not have the intuition or cultural savvy to lead and develop an infant industry that would soon be projecting not just images on a silver screen but a common public culture to a nation in transition. Committed as they were to Victorian sensibilities, American Protestants turned their noses up at the shabby industry while dismissing movies as popular, commercially driven amusements, not serious art. Thus, as Romanowski writes, “instead of the middle classes controlling the motion pictures and spreading high culture among the lower classes, the opposite occurred. To the chagrin of the cultural elite, the immigrant entertainments seemed to be moving out of the urban ghettos and were attracting a middle class audience.”
By the late 1920s, when it was clear that movies were here to stay, religious leaders changed their approach. Rather than attacking or ignoring the first American cultural institution not under Protestant control, they began to exert pressure on Hollywood to “turn this powerful entertainment medium into an instrument of progress and human betterment.” The result: the famous 1930 Production Code that guided Hollywood through its classic studio era, transforming the film producers into promoters and definers of the emerging American dream.
“Hollywood moguls,” observes the author, “were in the business of propagating a national culture; the payback was a large national audience, high profits, and no federal censorship.” While most Protestants save a few fundamentalists supported this arrangement, the code–written by a Jesuit priest and largely enforced by the Roman Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency–further revealed the weakened grip of Anglo-Saxon Protestants on American culture.
Romanowski believes the adversary stance toward the movie industry by media critics like Michael Medved and Ted Baehr stems in part from the replacement of the 1930 code with the Motion Picture Association of America’s 1968 rating system that “cut film loose from its nation building role.” He faults the traditionalists, among other things, for failure to acknowledge the inherent weaknesses of the Production Code that were every bit as responsible for its demise as creeping secularism: “By limiting their efforts to negative criticism and a demand for morally safe entertainment suitable for the entire family, [today’s reformers] fail to recognize other legitimate roles for the cinema and to acknowledge the need for artists to cultivate the potential of the medium and for people to understand its significance as a medium of cultural communication.”
While Romanowski notes it in passing, he does not explore the irony of evangelical performers, whether a Billy Sunday of yesterday or a Pat Robertson of today, who condemn the popular arts yet “justify their employment of entertainment media and formats by an appeal to a higher ‘sacred’ purpose, such as evangelization or worship.”
That task is taken up in What on Earth Are We Doing? where John Fischer questions the evangelical passion to copy prevailing art forms with a safer version rather than infusing “the customs, civilization and achievements of every age and society with people who love and fear God.”
Fischer believes something is terribly wrong with modern evangelicalism, the world into which he was born, baptized, and educated and in which he has pursued a vocation. The evangelical love of bumper-sticker slogans that imply a clear word of God on the most complex issues of the day robs the Christian faith of wonder and excitement. Drawing upon childhood memories of having his father’s exclusive attention during long car trips when the rest of the family was sleeping, Fischer illustrates how talks with Dad aroused his curiosity and led to more discussion: “Remove paradox and complexity and ambiguity and uncertainty from your worldview and you will miss the most important thing of all for a believer–moments like this with your heavenly Father.”
Fischer concludes that the building of a sanitized subculture–where the term Christian is more an adjective than a noun–arises not out of any biblical mandate but simply because it works; it helps evangelicals cope with modern life. “We live as if Christianity were true, not because it is true, but because it works for us,” Fischer says. This pragmatic, foxhole Christianity cuts evangelicals off from the truth and beauty with which God has endowed the world through common grace.
Failing to nurture the common ground believers share with unbelievers, the very people Jesus commanded to “fear not” because they have a Father in heaven end up exhibiting an inordinate fear and anxiety that only alienates an unbelieving generation.
Fischer notes that Christ came to the world to seek and to save sinners–not to condemn and correct them. The California artist calls evangelicals to take up an alternative paradigm: “If we are concerned about getting the gospel out to the world, we will have to change our attitudes about the world. We will need to see the world not so much as wrong as it is lost.”
In addition, Fischer observes that the world does not need any more “Christian” art but more Christians in the arts, a perspective that can apply to every calling. Thus he wants us to recover the classic Protestant doctrine of vocation: “It’s time to get out of our subculture where so much is assumed, and become artists who must struggle with our faith, the message and the art form, and an audience that does not presume belief. The challenge will sharpen our faith and our ability to articulate it.”
The issue that Fischer does not raise, but to which both volumes point, is to what extent a schizophrenic world-view is built into evangelicalism, and to what extent those who buy Romanowski’s analysis or follow Fischer’s advice cease to be evangelicals. That is a question for the theologians to answer, but in the meantime, Pop Culture Wars and What on Earth Are We Doing? provide plenty of fuel for that debate, exploring the difficult dimensions of authentic Christian faith in late twentieth-century America.
-Robert W. Patterson is associate editor of the Wilberforce Forum in Reston, Virginia.
Copyright© 1997 by Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.
